• Americans spend $30 - 50 billion on weight loss annually and this does not include surgical treatments for obesity.
• At any given moment, 40 percent of women and 25 percent of men in the United States are trying to lose weight yet obesity in America continues to rise!
• Nearly 50 percent of all women who diet are not overweight
• The more rapid the weight loss, the greater the proportion of lean tissue or muscle loss. This loss of lean tissue can cause damage to organs including the heart.
• Many women today are becoming vegetarian as a consequence of their fear of fat. While a vegetarian diet may have positive effects on nutrition and health, some continue to eat nearly the same amount of fat from baked goods and desserts. Selecting a well balanced vegetarian diet requires knowledge and planning, an investment many neglect to make.
• A study of 1468 female students and 1062 male students at Michigan State University reported that nearly 50 percent of the women and 6 percent of the men had taken a diet pill containing PPA (phenylpropanolamine) at some time. About 1/4 of the women admitted to having taken twice the recommended dosage.
• Diet pills with PPA lead all major non-prescription drugs in the number of adverse drug reactions. They result in nearly 47,000 calls to Poison Control Centers annually.
• A study at a large southern university found that 39 percent of female smokers and 25 percent of male smokers used smoking to avoid a weight gain.
This is why people cannot maintain their weight loss once it has occurs. Diets teach deprivation or require eating special diet foods, and because of this, we cannot possibly stay on it. How realistic is it to believe that we can stay on grapefruit or cabbage soup for the rest of our lives? When we deprive ourselves of the foods that we like, we crave them even more! This often leads to bingeing on the foods that we have been trying to avoid.
Dieting and depriving our bodies of proper nutrition will affect our metabolism. After all, our bodies will not let us starve. Eating too little food can actually make it more difficult to lose weight. Our bodies try to hold on to the weight to survive. The metabolic rate slows down, and our bodies try to store any a portion of the incoming calories in our fat cells to make sure there is a reserve for the next time you go on a starvation diet. The moral is: the problem of gaining weight gets worse with every diet that you go on, and you will probably weigh much more than before you started the diet.
